The computation of global invariant manifolds has seen renewed interest in recent years. We survey different approaches for computing a global stable or unstable manifold of a vector field, where we concentrate on the case of a two-dimensional manifold. All methods are illustrated with the same example — the two-dimensional stable manifold of the origin in the Lorenz system.

We present a new continuation method for computing implicitly defined manifolds. The manifold is represented as a set of overlapping neighborhoods, and extended by an added neighborhood of a boundary point. The boundary point is found using an expression for the boundary in terms of the vertices of a set of finite, convex polyhedra. The resulting algorithm is quite simple, allows adaptive spacing of the computed points, and deals with the problems of local and global overlap in a natural way. The algorithm is robust (the new points need only be near the boundary), and is well suited to problems with large embedding dimension, and small to moderate dimension.

The computation of global invariant manifolds has seen renewed interest in recent years. We survey different approaches for computing a global stable or unstable manifold of a vector field, where we concentrate on the case of a two-dimensional manifold. All methods are illustrated with the same example-the two-dimensional stable manifold of the origin in the Lorenz system.

No abstract

Abstract-This paper provides an algorithm for computing singularity-free paths on closed-chain manipulators. Given two non-singular configurations of the manipulator, the method attempts to connect them through a path that maintains a minimum clearance with respect to the singularity locus at all points, which guarantees the controllability of the manipulator everywhere along the path. The method can be applied to non-redundant manipulators of general architecture, and it is resolution-complete. It always returns a path whenever one exists at a given resolution, or determines path non-existence otherwise. The strategy relies on defining a smooth manifold that maintains a one-to-one correspondence with the singularity-free C-space of the manipulator, and on using a higher-dimensional continuation technique to explore this manifold systematically from one configuration, until the second configuration is found. If desired, the method can also be used to compute an exhaustive atlas of the whole singularity-free component reachable from a given configuration, which is useful to rapidly resolve subsequent planning queries within such component, or to visualize the singularity-free workspace of any of the manipulator coordinates.Examples are included that demonstrate the performance of the method on illustrative situations.